It was fall 2008, and my husband, Ham, and I were fresh-faced culinary school graduates. We'd moved to New York City and started our first jobs as line cooks—Ham was elbows deep in lavash dough most days, while I was peeling and deveining shrimp by the truckload. As members of the B team at our respective kitchens, we both had Thanksgiving Day off .
I emerged physically intact but too broke to take a cab, so I began a snowy trek to our home in West Chelsea in perforated Chuck Taylors, a reusable tote slung over each shoulder, and a 14-pound turkey hugged to my chest. Our studio was across the street from the Chelsea public housing complex on Ninth Avenue, steps away from Penn Station. The Craigslist post had described it as "a micro-loft, with bohemian character." This meant that it was a few strides long in either direction, with a rickety ladder leading to a lofted deck for the bed. Drawing from the Ikea "small spaces" inspiration page, we had tricked out the place with Liatorp, Fintorp, and several Grundtals.
As the fat rendered from the turkey's skin and dripped onto the electric coils, the oven shot off sparks. We stood close by with a fire extinguisher as the apartment filled with haze and the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms simultaneously rang out. Luckily, after an initial layer of soot had formed on the turkey, the air cleared enough that we could proceed. Ash was all the rage in the haute restaurant scene back then, so I was comfortable calling it an ash-roasted turkey.
I covered the tiny Swedish island with flour for the thousandth attempt at fixing my life. I don't mess around with booze in the crust or any precooked filling. I believe in, the kind my perpetually-dusted-in-White-Lily-Southern-spirit-grandmother would make me. After some rolling and crimping and filling, I popped it into my trusty $30 Black & Decker toaster oven and pulled up a chair.
After the first guest showed up, I was already mentally declaring myself a champion, but as we started to tuck into the modest banquet, the buzzer kept going off. I could hear the crowd cheering in my head as one after another, people kept piling in: the line cook who had just moved from Florida, the hostess from Trinidad and Tobago, the busser from Ireland, even the bartender avoiding her Long Island family.
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